AMD says that its upcoming "Bobcat" core for netbooks and notebooks is smaller than a single-core Intel Atom chip – and faster. According to the company, this low-power architecture could eventually follow Atom into the server market, but at the moment, that territory is still reserved for the "Bulldozer."

Cloud.com – the outfit that offers a platform for transforming your existing data center setup into a so-called infrastructure cloud – has introduced support for VMware's vSphere 4.1 hypervisor and its accompanying vCenter management console. The CloudStack platform already dovetails with other hypervisors, including open source mainstays Xen and KVM.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them," said mathematician Alfred Lord Whitehead, in his 1911 tome, An Introduction to Mathematics. And with its Autonomic Computing effort, IBM believes it's advancing civilization.

Verbatim is best known for its range of straightforward and affordable hard disks, memory sticks and other storage devices. However, its new MediaShare drive is a little more ambitious. The low-profile aluminium chassis bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s Mac Mini or AppleTV, but it’s essentially a good-looking Nas drive with a few extra media-streaming features thrown in for good measure.

When on holiday in the Dordogne two weeks ago (feels like two months now!), I picked up a Sunday Times newspaper which stated that the government was reducing grant-funding for speed cameras. This was given the thumbs-up by the paper which reported that many motorists see such cameras as a tax first and a life-saver second.

Those of you who've been following our Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) programme are invited to spare a thought today for Microsoft's Phoenix glider, which failed to demonstrate the Right Stuff over the weekend at Red Bull's Flugtag competition in Long Beach, California.

A microwave "pain ray" energy weapon, deemed too controversial for US military use in Iraq, has nonetheless gone into service. A trial installation is in use at a prison in Los Angeles for the purpose of quelling fights among the inmates.

Sony's second blast of digital SLR-age this morning involves a pair of low-end Alphas - A33 and A55 - that use what appears to be a half-silvered mirror in place of the usual DSLR moving mirror to improve the way the cameras can autofocus moving objects.

The United States' X-37B robot mini-shuttle spaceplane, which was launched into orbit on a classified mission in April, has changed its orbit. However the "secret space warplane" - as the X-37B has been dubbed by the Iranian government - has now been re-acquired by alert amateur skywatchers.

This spring, a startup called Makara came out of stealth mode with a beta of a product called Cloud Application Platform, which as the name suggests allowed companies to set up private platform clouds like Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, or Engine Yard internally on their own iron. Today, Makara is doing something that will perhaps be more interesting, which is layering atop Amazon's EC2 infrastructure cloud to turn it into a platform cloud.

Microsoft chief architect of identity Kim Cameron has insisted that the "non-personal information" collected by Apple can be used to personally identify you – despite angry counterarguments from at least one Jobsian fanboi.

Mozilla has released a fourth Firefox 4 beta, adding in its seasoned bookmark-syncing service, Firefox Sync, and its new tab-sorting interface, originally dubbed Tab Candy and now known as Tab Panorama.

A day after Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Windows applications that executes malicious code on end-user PCs, the first exploits have been released targeting programs including the Firefox browser, uTorrent BitTorrent client, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Another VMworld event is coming down the pike from VMware with everyone riding its virtualization wake, and containing VM sprawl is still a problem. Which is why Embotics is kicking up its V-Commander server virtualization management system for VMware hypervisors to the 3.6 release level.